Climate Science Rapid Response Team Asks Monckton for Help

The Climate Science Rapid Response Team is a match-making service to connect climate scientists with lawmakers and the media. The group is committed to providing rapid, high-quality information to media and government officials. To use the service, requesters use the inquiry form to identify themselves, pose their question and provide a deadline for the response. That information is then immediately sent to Dr. John Abraham, Dr. Ray Weymann, and me. One of these three “matchmakers” then immediately forwards the inquiry to those scientists with the most appropriate expertise. An authoritative response from one of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team scientists will be returned to the inquirer either directly or via one of the three matchmakers. For more information about the Team and to read about a typical day when I am “on call” see Lisa Palmer’s story over at the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media.

John, Ray, and I occasionally receive “crank inquiries” from the Climate Science Rapid Response Team web site. These emails are normally deleted. On Friday April 29, 2011 we received an inquiry from Dr. Abu Ali-Hussain of the Doric Foundation, an organization claiming to be academic advisors to a group of Gulf States’ sovereign wealth funds. A quick search revealed no such organization and the inquiry came from the UK. The inquiry is strikingly like something that would have originated from the 3rd Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley. Instead of deleting the request, John, Ray, and I replied with the message below. (The initial inquiry from Dr. Abu Ali-Hussain appears below our response.)

Esteemed Abu Ali Al-Hussain,

First of all, our heartiest congratulations on having reached your 1031st birthday.

Regarding your several inquiries about climate issues, these inquiries suggest a level of such profound mis-apprehension of fundamental statistical analysis and climate science, that, rather than send them to some of our qualified experts, we think it more appropriate to refer you to someone with an equally profound mis-apprehension of these same issues. Specifically, we suggest you contact 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley.

Should you wish further material we refer you to the document “Climate Scientists Respond” where issues bearing a remarkable resemblance to the ones raised in your inquiry are dealt with at length.

Finally, if we may be so bold, would you be so kind as to intercede with your patrons at the Gulf States Sovereign Wealth funds to see if they would be willing to make a modest contribution of 1 billion $US to defray the cost of administering the CSRRT.

Your humble and obedient servants,

John Patrick Abraham
Scott A. Mandia
Ray J. Weymann

p.s. Please do not take offense, but in your next inquiry would you endeavor to be less prolix. The demands on our time are exceedingly great.

Name: Dr. Abu Ali Al-Hussain

Email: (censored)

Organization: Doric Foundation

Organization Description: Academic advisors to a group of Gulf States’ sovereign wealth funds

Response Needed By: Soonest

Enquiry: This inquiry is confidential and we must ask you not to use our name in any of your publicity. We are currently reviewing the state of climate science as presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On pages 37, 104, and 253 of the Fourth Assessment Report (2007), the IPCC reproduces a graph of annual mean global surface temperature anomalies from the Hadley Center/Climatic Research Unit, overlaid by four linear-regression trend-lines starting respectively in approximately 1855, 1905, 1955 and 1980 and all ending in 2005. Our previous enquiries have established that the scientists’ final draft of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report contained the same graph, but with only a single trend-line, from 1855-2005. Our principals are concerned that between the submission of the scientists’ final draft and publication of the official IPCC document the three additional – and, if our understanding is correct, gratuitous – trend-lines were added, without any statement to the effect that an alteration had been made, and that on each of the three pages where the graph thus altered was reproduced a conclusion was unjustifiably inserted to the effect that the rate of global warming is itself accelerating. Our enquiries have also established that the chairman of the IPCC has had this improper methodology and the consequently improper conclusion drawn to his attention, in person as well as in writing, but that he has failed to make any correction or to restore the graph as originally submitted by the scientists, or to explain why no such correction should be made. It appears to us that the IPCC’s conclusion that the rate of warming is accelerating, and that we are to blame, is central to the case being made in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. However, our principals are concerned that this conclusion is on three occasions stated on the basis of a graph which has been altered in a manner that constitutes an inappropriate statistical technique, raising questions about the reliability of the conclusion. As a heuristic, we have determined that careful selection of start-points for multiple trend-lines on a sufficiently short segment of the graph of a sine-wave, which we chose because its long-run trend is by definition zero, can suggest, falsely, either that the trend is rising at an accelerating rate or that it is falling at an accelerating rate. Our questions to you are as follows:

1. Are we correct in understanding that the graph as it appears on the three pages in question has indeed been altered from the form in which it was originally submitted?

2. If the graph was altered, by whom was it altered, and on whose order or authority?

3. If the graph was altered, what steps did the IPCC take to ensure that the alterations were peer-reviewed, and who, if anyone, peer-reviewed the graph in its altered form?

4. Are we justified in our understanding that the IPCC is incorrect in reaching its central conclusion on the basis of the relative slopes of the inserted trend-lines, and that the statistical technique upon which it seeks to rely in reaching that central conclusion is defective?

5. Irrespective of whether the IPCC used a correct statistical technique to reach its central conclusion, is that conclusion in fact correct? We have determined that the Central England Temperature Record, which our analysis of the data suggests is a respectable proxy for global temperature anomalies, inferentially because the stations are at a temperate latitude, showed a warming of approximately 2.2 K from 1695-1730, equivalent to a centennial rate of 6.5 K, an order of magnitude greater than the warming observed in the 20th century, and four times greater than the maximum supra-decadal rate of warming observed in the entire 161 years of the global instrumental record, which occurred from 1860-1880, 1910-1940, and 1976-2001, since when there has been no warming. On the face of things, it does not seem to us that a discernible human influence on the global temperature record is yet discernible. Are we right?

6. We have discovered that the scientists’ final draft of the 1995 Second Assessment Report of the IPCC contained five statements – which our own analysis of the data supports – to the effect that no discernible human influence on global temperature had yet been detected, and that it was not possible to say when such an influence would be detected. However, by the time of publication all five of these statements had been deleted and replaced with a single statement to the opposite effect. Which of the two positions is right, and why?

7. We have discovered that the scientists’ final draft of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report was altered upon receipt by the IPCC with the insertion of a table of contributions to sea-level rise that did not sum to within a factor 2 of the correct total, and that the reason for the error was an order-of-magnitude overstatement by the IPCC of the contributions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise both since the 1960s and again since 1993. Our enquiries have established that the error was reported to the IPCC on the day of publication. On looking at the revised version of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report we have verified that the table now sums correctly and that the four order-of-magnitude overstatements have been corrected, but we cannot find any acknowledgement or statement that the originally-published report has been thus altered. Are you able to point us to the relevant statement? Our principals are naturally concerned that alterations can be made n ot only to the scientists’ final drafts of the IPCC’s assessment reports but also to the published reports themselves without any explicit statement being placed on the record to the effect that the alterations have been made.

8. We note that all four of the IPCC’s assessment reports – 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007 – are heavily based on and biased in favor of modeling as opposed to theory and observation. The IPCC has been making long-term predictions of future climate states on the basis of modeling: yet its 2001 Third Assessment Report says that the climate is a complex, non-linear, chaotic object, so that the prediction of future climate states is not possible. Our principals are concerned at this apparently serious contradiction. On reading Sir James Lighthill’s paper of 1998 on the chaoticity of a pendulum’s oscillation, and Edward Lorenz’s paper of 1963 on deterministic non-periodic flow, we conclude that there are indeed fundamental constraints on the modeling of a chaotic object such as the climate. Does the IPCC’s approach take these constraints sufficiently into account?

9. The First Assessment Report appears to predict – again on the basis of modeling – that global temperature would rise by 0.8 K in the 40 years 1990-2030, based on the assumption that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 2.5 K warming. Are we right in understanding that, so far, the warming rate has been <0.2 K in the 20 years since 1990, Implying that the IPCC’s original medium-term projection of future global temperature change may prove to have been excessive by a factor 2, even though the IPCC’s current central estimate is that the warming at CO2 doubling will be 3.3 K? 10. Please supply estimates of the radiative forcings from all anthropogenic influences in the 61 years since 1950, the first year in which, according to the IPCC’s 2001 report, reliable measurements of the climate-relevant species of greenhouse gases were available, and draw our attention to any clear statement in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the appropriate interval for the 21st-century transient-climate-sensitivity parameter.

65 Responses

Good call. It looks like classic Monckton hyperbole and an array of red herring to add to his feast of famine in such distinct lack of relevance and appropriate context. All earmarks of the Viscount’s modus operendi.

I think if the Foundation does provide you the funding, then you will be able to address his questions more in depth though ;)

Bingo! The Googling Monkeys at the Climate Capitalist Capitol have determined that a search of:

“complex, non-linear, chaotic object” monckton

(point 8 from Abu Ali) produces 1500 hits, including the 2008 classic from American Stinker (http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/companies_could_be_sued_over_c.html) containing, “Even the UN’s climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, admits in its 2001 report that the climate is a “complex, non-linear, chaotic object” whose long-run evolution cannot be predicted by any method.”
Looks like the “Lord” has grounds for a plagiarism charge.

A simple equation based on the physical phenomena involved, with inputs of accepted measurements from government agencies, calculates the average global temperatures (agt) since 1895 with 88.4% accuracy (87.9% if CO2 is assumed to have no influence). See the equation, links to the source data, an eye-opening graph of the results and how they are derived in the pdfs at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true (see especially the pdfs made public on 4/10/10, and 3/10/11).

The future average global temperature trend that this equation calculates is down.

This trend is corroborated by the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising agt. From 2001 through Feb, 2011 the atmospheric CO2 increased by 22.2% of the total increase from 1800 to 2001 while the average global temperature has not increased. The 22.2% CO2 increase is the significant measurement, not the comparatively brief time period. The trend of the average of the five reporting agencies has declined steeply since the peak of the last El Nino in about March 2010.

Some people are so blinded by ideology that they are unable to recognize reality. However, as the atmospheric CO2 continues to rise in the 21st century while the agt does not, more people will realize that they have been deceived.

Mandia: Everybody should read this comment to learn about the non-scientific technique called cherry-picking data. This comment also shows a lack of understanding of the total climate system which is rapidly warming over the past several decades. See: Modern Day Climate Change.

Take off the blinders. Anyone with a hint of true scientific ability would not conclude that calculating temperature up-trends and down-trends with an accuracy of 88% for 115 years and counting is ‘cherry picking’.

If you had actually looked at the pdfs at the link you would have seen that they are primarily graphs of temperature data from the five reporting agencies and that there has not been a sustained average temperature increase for over a decade in spite of the substantial increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Are you even aware that 1996 was the last year that the average global temperature was lower than it has been for the last three months? Or that the temperature trend has been rapidly declining since the peak of the last El Niño in March 2010? This weather fits the calculated climate predictions in the pdfs at the link.

Apparently many so-called Climate Scientists are so mired in the minutia of weather and the forced predictions of there faulty computer programs that they are unable to see the natural trends of climate.

Dan, ever thought of checking what your curve-fit gives you before 1880? Say back to 1600. There are some very accurate reconstructions of northern hemisphere temperature going back to then that even Macintyre wouldn’t have a problem with. This would make a great reality-check for your curve-fit.

Apparently the blinders are still firmly in place. The observation that average global temperature is no higher than it was 15 years ago was ignored as was the equation that calculates the average global temperatures for 115 years with over 88% accuracy.

The separation between the rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and not rising average global temperature trend is wide and growing. It is leading more and more people to realize that belief in AGW was a mistake.

Mandia: It is not belief. AGW is fact. The deniers are the “believers”.

Weaker sun . . . How does that explain the warm temperatures just before and just after the Andean/Saharan? There was nothing to cause the atmospheric CO2 to decline before the A/S. Change to CO2 level had no significant influence then or now.

If you had looked at the Vostok ice core data, which is graphed at the Middlebury link, and understood how feed back works, you would realize that the temperature trend direction changes demonstrate that feedback from CO2 change can not be significantly positive. Thus the IPCC assumption of high positive CO2 feedback is wrong as has been further demonstrated by the separation between the rising CO2 level and not rising temperature trend for over a decade.

I wonder how wide this separation will need to get for you to realize that maybe you missed something. I will be watching . . .

The real threat is the coming cold. You could get an early start . . .

Adelady:
The top graph on page 4 of the pdf made public on 3/10/11 at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true shows the calculated average global temperature trend till 2037. The research finds that the change to atmospheric CO2 has insignificant influence so the lower projection is most likely. The huge thermal capacitance of the oceans slows the decline of average global temperature to that shown. Land temperature will decline faster.

The pdf made public 6/27/10 contains a ‘lower limit’ graph for average global temperature. This is for no sunspots and no CO2 influence. That calculation shows that, because of the huge thermal capacitance of the oceans, the average global temperature won’t get down to the 1940-1980 range until about 2030. It depends on the time-integral of sunspot numbers and solar prediction has not been done very accurately yet. The solar experts are observing that the sun is acting a lot like it did at the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

This doesn’t look so bad except that we live and grow food on land. I graphed both the average land temperature and the average ocean temperature, as reported by NOAA, during the warm-up that took place from about 1976 to about 2004. At the end of the warm-up, land temperature was about 0.4 C higher than the ocean. Just as land warmed faster during a warm-up, it will cool faster during a cool down. Land will be up to about 0.4 C COOLER than the ocean in 2030. That puts land temperatures down to where crop failures from cold become an issue.

Dan “The research finds that the change to atmospheric CO2 has insignificant influence..”

I didn’t really pick up on this before. What research?

Is this research showing that CO2 emissions will decline so much that there will be lesser consequences – or that CO2 emitted from now on will have different effects from that already emitted? No accounting for ‘in the pipeline’?

I’ve not heard of anything like this until now. (Apart from the obvious point about the differences between land and ocean I suppose.) And it sounds quite strange in terms of the physics of greenhouse gases.

Which part of “This is just as off-topic here as it has been at all the other blogs where you have posted it” don’t you understand?
Which part of “The climate is not a mechanical system” don’t you understand?
Which part of “If a mechanical engineer has a hammer, not everything is a nail” don’t you understand?

Aye, the “technological ability” shows that global warming is false, by allowing Monckton to create a sock puppet named “Abu Ali Al-Hussain” of the “Doric Foundation” that gives advice to “Gulf States’ sovereign wealth funds” controlled by emirs and other powerful people?

(And of course it’s not be called a “sock puppet” because Dan just arbitrarily added the requirement that the sock puppet must say “All Hail Lord Monckton!” or some such before it can be called a “sock puppet”, and otherwise it should simply be called a “technological ability”, which is a 9-syllable phrase that sounds so nice that Dan can’t help but keep repeating it.)

Dan, your ‘skeptic’ defence of the indefensible is getting more and more hysterical…

[…] professional and amateur alike, they are also the characteristics that give delayers, doubters and liars in the climate debates ample material for confusing and misrepresenting reality. One such […]

Tthese 7 questions seem to go to the heart of the warming scare since if any of them cannot be aswered in a way that supports alarmism then there is no case to answer. For some reason Mr Mann has declined to answer them privately (as indeed has every other warming alarmist asked:

His first profound question was “Do you accept Professor Jones’ acknowledgement that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995?” Dr. Jones was answering a loaded question designed to extract an answer that denialists could exploit. The strict statistical truth was that over a carefully selected short time period (1995 – 2009) the mathematical significance fell slightly below the 95% mark. His answer was in fact “Yes, but only just.” This was not an admission that warming had been “insignificant”, which is what denialists have tried to spin.

Well nice to see this site holding up the normal standard of integrity to be expected by alarmists.

Nothing but censorship and lying abuse.

Lets go for an 8th question:

8) Do you accept that those who censor even the asking of such questions thus prove their own contempt of science? If so can anybody on the sceptical side who will not denounce the practice of censorship to promote alarmism by pseudoscientists be practicing scientific principles themselves?

I look forward to you answering, by again censoring, that you know there is absolutely nobody on the alarmist side who is not themselves wholly corrupt and in no way a real scientist.

In the pdf made public 3/10/11 at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true I provide a simple equation that calculates the average global temperatures since 1895 with 88.4% accuracy (87.9% if CO2 is assumed to have no influence). That research determined that 40% or 0.3 C of the total temperature change in the 20th century was caused by sunspot change as determined by the time-integral of the sunspot number.

Svensmark showed that more sunspots, as occurred in the last half of the 20th century, correlate with fewer low-level clouds. Fewer low level clouds means higher average cloud altitude, lower average cloud temperature, less energy radiated from the planet and thus a warming planet.

The pdf made public 6/21/11 demonstrates that a change of average cloud altitude of only 73 meters accounts for a surface temperature change of 0.3 C.

All of these findings are verifiable.

Any technical challenges to these findings are solicited.

Mandia: Dan, sunspots in the 2000s were near record lows yet nine of the ten years during that period were in the top ten warmest in the instrumental record. Also, how do fewer clouds make the upper atmosphere cooler or winters warming faster than summers? How do fewer clouds actually dampen the GHG warming that physics shows us must be happening?

The equation accurately calculates temperatures since 1895 which includes the last ten years. It calculates these warmer temperatures. The oceans cover 71% of the planet and have about 100 times the thermal capacitance of everything else. There is a lot of variation in the data but the Argo Floats program shows a declining trend since about 2004. The huge thermal capacitance of the oceans makes the decline of average global temperature slow so ‘highest temperatures in the instrument record’ will be true for years even as the temperature declines. The temperature trend over land will decline faster.

Fewer clouds do not make the upper atmosphere cooler. Fewer low level clouds makes average cloud altitude higher where it is cooler so they are cooler. Clouds are liquid water or ice so they radiate. If they are cooler they radiate less so the planet looses less energy so it warms.

The physics of ghg includes the log decline of IR flux with distance. It also includes the effect of thermalization which is discussed at length in the pdfs.

Ben- The equation accurately calculates average global temperatures for 115 years . . .and counting. How can you not grasp that?

Most of my work is based on sunspot, carbon dioxide level and temperature data as reported by government agencies. It is competently put together using an understanding of thermodynamics. The method is described in detail in the pdfs. There is no underlying theory. If you could understand the pdfs you would realize that.

It’s not particularly hard to cast around for a couple of variables that suit your biases and can create a close-fitting trend. The tricky part is to prove WHY they are controlling temperature and HOW they do it.

Modern science requires that observations must be recorded, that’s true. But then they must be evaluated in light of physics, chemistry, biology – and other observations – to assign worthwhile meaning to them.

Maths and stats are valuable – but they are only servants in the households of physics, medicine, chemistry and all scientific endeavour.

Dan, I can easily make an equation with several parameters that creates some kind of output, and then fit a completely different equation that also ‘fits’ the same graph. If the new equation completely violates the physical principles on which I based the first equation, this means the new equation is just mathturbation.

I have a good example of another person who has done his share of mathturbation: Roy Spencer. He once fitted an equation that, he claimed, showed 80% of the CO2 increase of the atmosphere was due to ocean outgassing, and only 20% from anthropogenic sources. It was not the equation itself that was wrong (nice fit…), but the basic premisses on which the equation was created. Like you, Spencer completely ignored whether his equation actually made any sense in the real world (in this particular case he ignored the enormously large sink that would have to exist somewhere else, as well as the observed pH decrease of the ocean surface layer).

Adelady,
I misled you with the word ‘observation’. I made no observations of nature myself. Instead I was referring to observing (using)the numbers for temperature anomaly, carbon dioxide level, sunspot number and planet nominal average temperature that are available on the web from competent sources. I provide the web links to them in the pdfs and, where so noted, average them to avoid bias.

Marco,
The objective should not be to ‘make an equation’ whose output could be matched by another made up equation. That would indeed be ‘mathturbation’.
The objective should be to make a rational equation, based on the physical phenomena involved, with only one input parameter (the sunspot number) that calculates agt since 1895 with an accuracy of 88% or better. That is what I did.

The constants, a, b, c, d are just that, constants. They indicate the relative importance of each of the natural phenomena being considered. An early version of the equation, in the pdf made public 4/10/10, explicitly shows them as constants. That was before I hit on using the coefficient of determination as a means to refine them. The details of doing this are under APPROACH on page 1 of the pdf made public 5/24/10.

I did not ignore whether my equation made any sense in the real world. Although you apparently do not yet realize it, the equation is based on what makes sense in the real world. An early description of what I did is described starting on page 12 of the pdf made public 4/10/10. It presumes at least a rudimentary understanding of thermodynamics and heat transfer.

In the pdf made public 6/21/11 I show that 40% of the global average temperature change would be accounted for by a change in average cloud altitude of only 73 meters. The 40% fraction comes from the analysis made public 3/10/11.

Cloud effects could, theoretically, account for a great many climate change effects. However there’s precious little science work showing they actually do so. Quite the contrary, scientists have worked like crazy since the 1970s to quantify the competing effects of aerosols and GHGs. And what they have repeated found is that the contribution of increasing GHGs overwhelms aerosol contributions.

And that’s a real shame for everyone. As John Greenleaf Whittier said:

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, that saddest are these:
”It might have been.”

Jay,
Increase of GHGs has no significant effect on climate. Apparently you missed this easily varifiable assertion in my May 2 post:

“This trend is corroborated by the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising agt. From 2001 through Feb, 2011 the atmospheric CO2 increased by 22.2% of the total increase from 1800 to 2001 while the average global temperature has not increased.[still true through May] The 22.2% CO2 increase is the significant measurement, not the comparatively brief time period. The trend of the average of the five reporting agencies has declined steeply since the peak of the last El Nino in about March 2010.”

As the CO2 level continues to increase and the temperature doesn’t the ‘scientists’ will eventually realize that they must have missed something.

To be honest, I’ve no idea why Prof. Mandia is still giving Pangburn a platform for spewing his entirely off-topic nonsense about ‘global cooling’ just so that he can distract the discussion away from Monckton’s sock puppetry.

As if the inactivist movement doesn’t already have its own platforms (such as the Heartland ‘Institute’ and Monckton’s[*] favourite Science and Public Policy ‘Institute’) for spreading its own nonsense…

Unless your equation also explains why Monckton had to create a sock puppet called Abu Ali al-Hussain, you should just shut the heck up about your oh-so-great equation, and learn some basic things such as why sock puppetry isn’t a valid debating technique.

A simple equation based on the physical phenomena involved, with inputs of accepted measurements from government agencies, calculates the average global temperatures (agt) since 1895 with 88.4% accuracy (87.9% if CO2 is assumed to have no influence). See the equation, links to the source data, an eye-opening graph of the results and how they are derived in the pdfs at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true (see especially the pdfs made public on 4/10/10, and 3/10/11).

The future average global temperature trend that this equation calculates is down.

This trend is corroborated by the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising agt. From 2001 through May, 2011 the atmospheric CO2 increased by 22.3% of the total increase from 1800 to 2001 while the average global temperature has not increased. The 22.3% CO2 increase is the significant measurement, not the comparatively brief time period. The trend of the average of the five reporting agencies has declined steeply since the peak of the last El Nino in about March 2010.

As the atmospheric CO2 continues to rise in the 21st century while the agt does not, more people will realize that they have been deceived.